Checking In On What Is Available In China

Published: July - 2001

Despite having the world's largest human population, China also has the third largest landmass, behind Russia and Canada, with a wide variety of habitats spread across its 3.7 million square miles. Outside of its enormous urban areas, coastal regions and farmlands, much of that habitat, particularly in the desolate west, the mountains and on the high Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, is remarkably under-inhabited and home to significant numbers of game animals. This, along with a growing understanding of the conservation ethic and a keen interest in attracting foreign sportsmen (and their hard currency), has led China in the last decade to rouse itself from being the "sleeping giant" of the hunting world into full wakefulness.

If China is not the most important Asian hunting destination, yet, it certainly ranks with Russia and Mongolia as a place every serious big game hunter will be traveling to, sooner rather than later. Here's a survey of what's available in China for those sportsmen when they arrive.

China, of course, has the greatest number of huntable argali species in the world, a full half dozen, and I will have more to say about them in a note at the end of this report. Its most important sheep, though, and probably the most attractive to the first-time China hunter, or the first-time hunter of foreign sheep, is the Qinghai blue sheep. This stocky, blue-gray-white caprid is actually a psuedo-sheep, somewhere between the goats and sheep genetically. They live in large bands at very high altitudes (15,000 feet and sometimes more), and horses are used to carry hunters into the tall hills. The guides are often ethnic Tibetans with little or no command of English, but they are very capable at getting a hunter into position to pick out a trophy ram and get a long-range shot, with success running virtually 100 percent. Any sheep in the low- to mid-20s in horn length is a trophy, and a 30-incher was taken in 1998.

The hunts run four days, and involve very long drives on either end to and from camp, but the hunters'........(continued)